Forthcoming: GRBS Vol 59 No 2 (Summer 2019)

Virginia M. Lewis, “Two Sides of the Same Coin: The Ideology of Gelon’s Innovative Syracusan Tetradrachm”

The coin’s iconography – river god Alpheos/two barley grains – revises earlier Syracusan types so as to signal the new tyrant’s Olympic victory, his patronage of Demeter and Persephone, and his claim to power in Sicily.

Callimachus’ Anth.Pal. 7.522, by withholding from the passer-by any effective information about the dead, is consistent with the bleak sequence 517-525, whose theme is the vacuity of any afterlife.

Kathryn Louise Tempest, “Meidias and the Mute Witness: Cicero’s Debt to Demosthenes in the Verrines Reconsidered”

Cicero reworks Demosthenes’ presentation (21.83-100) of a silent victim unable to testify, in order to offer the Roman jurors, especially those familiar with Demosthenes’ speech, a visible and powerful testimony to Verres’ malfeasance.

Wim Nijs, “‘Then truly the life of the gods will pass to men’: Contemplating Diogenes of Oenoanda’s Golden Age”

The description of a future golden age of Epicurean tranquility and the doctrine of unconcern about the future are not contradictory if this golden age is intended as pleasing to imagine rather than promised for the future.

Aude Busine, “Basil and Basilissa at Ancyra: Local Legends, Hagiography, and Cult”

Basil’s Passion (6th cent.), elaborated out of Sozomen HE and claiming the presence of Julian, has no historical basis, and the pairing with the martyr Basilissa (3rd cent.) was derived from inscriptions concerning a pagan Ancyran cult of Basileus and Basilissa.

The astute deployment of the Aristotelian logical treatment of homonyms by the ninth-century Iconophile thinkers Nicephorus and Theodore the Stoudite was prepared for by a long tradition of interpretation starting with Porphyry.